Alerts

An alert e-mails you when a strategy switches between Long and Flat or a portfolio's mix changes, so you don't have to check the site every few days; it never places a trade.

The strategies here move slowly. Von Lohengramm T7 - BTCUSD made 16 trades in almost twelve years, and most portfolios change their mix a handful of times a year. Checking every day for something that happens every few months is tedious, and easy to forget at exactly the wrong moment. An alert does the checking for you and sends an e-mail on the night a change happens.

Alerts are part of a paid plan. On the free version, the bell bell icon opens a window titled Email alerts that explains this, and the Alerts page in the top bar shows the same message with Login and See plans.

An alert is a message, nothing more. Golden Path Strategies doesn't connect to any exchange or broker, and nothing is bought or sold when an alert fires. If you decide to act on it, you place the order yourself, at a price that will differ from the backtest's.

The kinds of alert

There are three places to set one, and each watches something different.

A strategy alert always fires in both directions. There's no setting for "only tell me about entries".

When e-mails go out

Every night at about 00:10 UTC the site loads the newest prices, brings every strategy up to date, and then checks all alerts. That's 02:10 in Amsterdam in summer and 01:10 in winter, or 20:10 the previous evening in New York. E-mails go out right after the check, usually within minutes.

An alert only looks at finished bars. Crypto, gold and index strategies use bars of 5 calendar days that close at midnight UTC, and a strategy can only change its mind when a bar closes. So on the night a 5-day bar closes, the alert compares that bar with the one before and fires if the strategy flipped. Stock strategies such as those on SOXX use bars of 5 trading days, which close after the fifth session; their alerts go out the night after that close.

The newest bar on a chart can still be forming, and the Long/Flat pill on the site can show a change before that bar has closed. The alert waits until the bar is final, so an e-mail never reports a change that later disappears. Each change is e-mailed once; you won't get the same flip again the next night.

Quiet weeks and months are normal. If nothing has changed, nothing is sent.

Where the e-mails go

Unless you change it, alerts go to the e-mail address you signed in with. You can switch to another address at any time, either under Alert email in your profile or under Delivery on the Alerts page, and every alert you have follows the new address. The one address you can't use is our own support address, support@goldenpathstrategies.io.

To be sure the e-mails actually reach you, click Send test e-mail on the Alerts page. It sends a sample alert to your alert address, so you can check that it arrives and doesn't land in spam. You can send a few of those per hour.

Set an alert on a strategy

1. Open the strategy from Strategies.
2. Click the bell bell icon in the row of buttons next to its name.
3. Keep the suggested Alert name or type your own.
4. The alert goes to your alert address, which is the e-mail you signed in with unless you've changed it. If the window asks for Alert e-mail (needed once), fill it in; it's saved to your profile and used for all your alerts.
5. Optionally write a Description (see Your note below).
6. Click Create alert.

[1. The alert name, 2. your note, which is printed in the e-mail, 3. what the alert does: an e-mail when this strategy switches between Long and Flat, checked once a day after the nightly data update.]

The bell turns solid bell icon and its tooltip changes to "Alert is on". Clicking it again opens the same window and creates a second alert, which you'll rarely want.

Set an alert on a portfolio

1. Open a portfolio from Portfolios. The default portfolios work too.
2. Click the bell bell icon in the portfolio's header.
3. Choose Alert-Only or Alert Report.
4. Keep or change the name, optionally add a description, and click Create alert.

[Choose 1. Alert-Only for a short list of what changed, or 2. Alert Report for the full picture, then 3. add your note.]

The alert watches every strategy that's part of the portfolio's mix. Several strategies can flip on the same bar; you then get one e-mail listing all of them, not one e-mail each.

Alert-Only is enough if you just want to know that something happened and will open the portfolio to look. Alert Report is built for people who keep a close eye on a portfolio: it does the arithmetic of "what does this mean for each asset" for you.

What the e-mail looks like

Every e-mail says which bar it's about ("5D bar close"), lists each strategy that changed with ENTERED or EXITED, and has a button that opens the strategy or portfolio. Your note, if you wrote one, sits near the top under Your note.

[A strategy alert: the note you wrote, then the strategy that changed on this bar and which way.]

The Alert Report adds two blocks. The first shows the portfolio's split right after the change, as a ring chart with a percentage per asset. The second, What changed, has one line per asset with two ways of reading the same move. The big number is the change of the position itself: SELL BTC −56.8% means sell a little over half of the BTC you hold, and −100% means sell all of it. On the right you see the asset's share of the whole portfolio before and after (34.0% → 14.7%) and that difference as a share of the portfolio (−19.3% of portfolio). Cash gets a line too, so you can see how much more of the portfolio sits in cash afterwards.

[An Alert Report generated from sample data: the strategy that changed, the portfolio's new split, and one line per traded asset with the change of the position (big number) and of the portfolio (right).]

Only real trades are listed: the buys and sells the strategies made on that bar, plus the cash they freed up or used. Between signals the simulation never rebalances, so the other assets' shares just drift a little with their prices, and the report leaves that drift out because there's nothing to do about it. Those lines are also added up across strategies. If two strategies in the portfolio trade BTC and one buys while the other sells, you get one net BTC line, not two that cancel out. Both numbers translate directly to your own account. If you hold the BTC part yourself, "−56.8% of position" tells you which part of it to sell. If you follow the whole portfolio with 5,000, "−19.3% of portfolio" is roughly 965 worth of BTC. The e-mail doesn't give quantities, prices or order types; those depend on your account and your exchange.

As the e-mail itself says at the bottom, this is the simulated mix, not your real holdings. If you started later, skipped a trade, or your prices differed, your real split will drift from it.

Alert on an asset's share

This one watches how big one asset has grown inside a portfolio, for example "tell me when BTC is more than 40% of the portfolio".

1. Open a portfolio and click the Current chart tab.
2. Click a slice of the ring, or one of the asset buttons under it, such as BTC.
3. In the window that opens, the first line, Sell … % of BTC for …, is your own plan for what to do. It's saved with the alert as a reminder and never fires by itself.
4. Tick Also notify when BTC share goes above / below … % and set the level. This is the part that sends an e-mail.
5. Optionally add a description, then click Create alert.

[1. Your planned sell, saved as a reminder only. 2. Ticking this box adds the real alert: an e-mail when BTC's share crosses the level you set.]

The window itself points out that it doesn't place a trade. If you leave the box unticked, you only save the reminder, listed on the Alerts page as "Playbook rebalance", and no e-mail will ever come from it.

Your note

Every alert has an optional Description of up to 1,000 characters. It's printed in every e-mail that alert sends, under Your note. That's more useful than it sounds: an alert may fire four months after you set it, and by then you may not remember why you wanted it or what you'd decided to do.

Good notes are short and practical:

• "Main BTC signal. On an exit, move my BTC to stablecoins; on an entry, buy back the same amount."
• "Check the buy and sell lines, then place the orders on my exchange the same morning."
• "Part of my long-term plan. Don't act on a single Flat without checking the portfolio first."

You can add or change the note later on the Alerts page with the pen icon pen icon.

The Alerts page

Click the bell bell icon in the top bar, to the right of the menu, to open Your alerts.

[1. Delivery: the address all your alerts go to. 2. Your note on each alert. 3. Edit note, test and delete.]

• Delivery holds the address your alerts go to, which starts out as the e-mail you signed in with. It's the same field as Alert email in your profile (the person icon user icon); changing one changes the other. Type a new address and click Save. If no address is saved, the page warns that your alerts have nowhere to go.
• Send test e-mail sends a sample alert to that address, so you can see it arrive. It's limited to a few per hour.
• Watching lists each alert with what it watches, for example "BTCUSD · 5D · consensus · Goes long or flat" or "Portfolio · Alert Report · signals + rebalance", when it last fired, and your note.
• The pen pen icon edits the note. Save under it stores the change.
• The play icon play icon (Test alert) checks the alert against the latest finished bar and tells you on the card: "Would fire on the latest bar" or "Condition not met on the latest bar". It doesn't send an e-mail.
• The bin trash bin minimalistic icon deletes the alert immediately, without asking.
• Recent fires appears once something has fired and lists the latest ones, newest first.

There's no mute switch. To stop e-mails, delete the alerts. You can have up to 50 active alerts.

When an alert is paused

Sometimes an alert can't be checked. It then stays on the list, faded, with a reason:

Paused alerts have a resume icon restart icon. Clicking it turns the alert back on, but if the cause is still there, the next nightly check pauses it again.

When a plan ends, the nightly check with Whop signs you out and your alerts pause; nothing is deleted. Subscribe again with the same account and they pick up on the next night. If you'd rather not come back, you can still download or delete your data, as described in Free and paid access.

If no e-mail arrives

Alerts come by e-mail only. There's no SMS, Telegram or push notification.

Related

• Bookmarks
• Free and paid access
• Account, profile and settings
• Reading the portfolio charts
• How the backtests are built